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No detailed description available for \"Sociolinguistics in Japanese Contexts\".

This text presents a collection of papers by Takesi Sibata, one of the leading linguists in Japan. The book provides an introduction to Japanese sociolinguistics, and shows how it has developed largely independently from the Western tradition.

To establish whether Misao Tojo's (1954) expectation that regional dialect areas created by the dialect consciousness of ordinary people partially but not completely overlap those created by objective isoglosses, a dialect survey was conducted in 1957 among the inhabitants of the Itoigawa City & Omi Town (Japan) region; informants (N = 164, 1 per hamlet, mostly native males aged 60+) answered linguistic & sociolinguistic questions & indicated the degree of difference between their speech & the speech in neighboring hamlets. Responses were plotted on maps, resulting in the identification of 18 dialect areas & seven isolated language islands. Following a discussion of methodological issues, the divisions identified by the informants are compared to those based on linguistic differences gathered through the rest of the questionnaire. Remarkably few correspondences were found, suggesting that Tojo's hypothesis must be rejected. An attempt to match subjective perceptions to nonlinguistic, administrative realities was somewhat more successful, though not quite conclusive. Similar findings regarding the dialects in the state of Bern (Switzerland) by Paul Zinsli (1957) are discussed, & it is concluded that dialect perceptions probably form an insufficient basis for dialect classification. 10 Figures. S. Paul